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Drinking Liberally Cincinnati

Ever wondered who subscribes to pornographic websites? A Harvard professor named Benjamin Edelman did, and put together a study to try and identify which state's residents were the largest consumers of online porn. Depending on your point of view, the results are either very surprising, or not shocking at all.

Which state was the largest consumer? The God-fearing Mormon state of Utah, by a wide margin. More than one out of every 200 broadband connections in the state housed a subscription to one of the top 10 adult websites in existence (and lord only knows how many people subscribe to sites outside the top 10). The only other state to top the 1 in 200 ratio was Alaska, and given that they have to wear 16 layers of clothing all year, it's understandable that they'd want to see someone stripped down to just one or two.

In fact, of the top 10 states analyzed, eight of them (Utah, Alaska, Mississippi, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Arkansas, Louisiana, West Virginia) were red states. The only two blue states were Hawaii (which blows me away, since no one there wears any clothes anyways) and Florida (which was red until this year). By contrast, only four of the bottom ten were red states.

Let's be very clear on this. 22 states went red in 2008, and eight of them are in the top 10. That's almost double what you'd statistically expect. Clearly there's some serious repression going on in the righty states.

Interestingly, there was no mention in the study of whether the sites were heterosexual or homosexual porn. Who knows if this guy's senatorial client was a patron of those sites?